From Jon Carroll’s column today, quoting a reader, Ray Welch:

“We live in a country where many people think it’s great, even imperative, for the federal government to snoop on our phone calls, e-mail and library records, to deploy a private militia accountable to no one (Blackwater, or whatever it calls itself now), to give the president “unitary” powers during a state of perpetual war, to hold people under arrest indefinitely without charge and torture them in undisclosed locations, to search without a warrant (using so-called national security letters) and to disseminate internal propaganda, but bad, even evil, for the federal government to manage health care, because that might give it too much power, which it would abuse.

“My government can detain me indefinitely without a warrant and turn me over to Blackwater to be tortured, and lie to my family about where I am, but a federal health care program – now that is verging on totalitarianism.”